Israel, The Lebanon, and the Holocaust

31-07-2006

The slaughter of dozens of innocent civilians in Qana - many of them children - signals another ghastly installment in the Israeli government's campaign of state terrorism against the Lebanese people.

More than 50 non-combatants died in Sunday's airstrike, which was justified on the basis that residents had previously been warned to leave.

The folk who refused to flee will no doubt have had their own reasons - poverty, illness and sheer bloody-mindedness being amongst them - but only seriously twisted minds could think that justifies killing on an industrial scale.

There has already been condemnation from many in the international community - with the US and the UK, as usual, standing alone together like the last two wallflowers at the dance.

But unless Israel realises how seriously its damaging its own cause - globally, not just in the Middle East - the prospects for peace seem bleak.

Only last week, I received a chilling email circular equating the Zionist state with Nazism.

It purported to show, in graphic detail, the aftermath of a battle waged in the Palestinian refugee camp of Jenin in 2002.

The precise details of how the Israels put down an uprising there are still hotly disputed, but one suspects that for many of its (mainly Muslim) recipients around the world, that will be a mere detail.

They will simply take it as further evidence of what they already fervently believe; that in the defence of its right to exist as a nation, the Jewish state all too happily extinguishes the rights of others to exist at all.

It needs to be said at this point that Israel is not a Nazi state; and not just because the comparison is insulting and offensive to those whose families died in the Holocaust.

The Germany of the early 1930s may have had its problems, but it wasn't surrounded by hostile states openly committed to its eradication.

Israel is, and therefore assumes special licence for its self defence.

Nor does it, in any rational assessment, seek the destruction of any one race or group of people, as the Nazis did.

The fact that the comparison can be made though, and in some quarters at least be thought to hold water, is a sign of a worrying erosion of the country's position.

In the immediate aftermath of World War Two, once the full horror of Germany's extermination camps became known, Jews attracted sympathy as never before.

For centuries, they had been systematically discriminated against in much of the western world, but now were viewed with sympathy.

So much so that the United Nations even sanctioned the creation of a new nation state in the Middle East, created in the course of a bloody land-grab.

There had been genocides before of course, and sadly there have been more since (eg in Rwanda) - but the enormous calculating cruelty of Dachau, Auschwitz and so on gave Jews a unique international status.

It was a role embellished by their huge achievments in science and the arts - truly, they occupied the moral high ground.

Or at least they seemed to.

Now the current destruction of Lebanon's infrastructure - and the callous disregard of it people - is throwing all of that into doubt.

Israel increasingly looks like a playground bully; a bully willing to give the finger to the world, confident that his big Uncle Sam will be there to get him out of any scrapes he can't handle.

What a PR gift for Iran, which no one in the know seriously doubts is the biggest backer of Hizbollah.

Let no one be in any doubt that some in Teheran would be as happy to see the destruction of all Jews as old Adolf was.

But the current crisis could hardly be playing out better for them.

The sponsors of radical Islam can now confidently expect to see a new generation of martyrs volunteering to self-destruct in the name of Allah.

By indiscriminately killing ordinary people - even those who give tacit support to Hezbollah - the Israeli government is inadvertently making life more dangerous for all of us.

They certainly aren't Nazis - but they are fools. And murderous fools at that.